


absent treatment

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, M/M, Post-World War I, Retrospect Zine, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 20:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20233945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “Let’s make a trade,” Keith says, collaring Leandro in the corridor between Room 218 and the communal dining room Keith keeps to a small corner of. For a second, when Leandro blinks at him, Keith is a little afraid he’s forgotten who Keith is.It's 1920 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lance is alectore. Keith was a pilot.





	absent treatment

**Absent Treatment:** _dancing with a shy person, inexperienced dancer or awkward partner (slang, 1920s)_

  1. _Buenos Aires, Argentina. _

Keith washes up in Buenos Aires when summer is nearly through, the sun rising to a white-hot blister by each noon and Keith a fresh wanderer underneath the sweltering cast of it. The city’s population is transformed by the heat, all glistening skin and glossy eyes. There’s Sunday processions in Spanish and Monday gossip in Portuguese, the easy flair of Italian curling up at the corners of people’s pronunciation. He rents an attic room with white-painted shutters, the layers of the years flaking off every time he opens them wide in the morning to watch his neighbour go to work - something he does every morning, yawning into the cup of his hand, eyelids heavy, a beaten leather belt serving as a book strap and slung over his shoulder.

For the first week, Keith just walks the streets aimlessly, missionless, waiting for the city to resolve itself into coherency - waiting for the moment when the feeling of being deeply, absurdly lost eases. He drinks small, bitter coffees and watches the dusk shift to dark, the buzz of newly electric lights gleaming through the windows. The streetlamps douse the street in translucent gold and his neighbour comes home, minus his books, smiling a smile that’s all teeth and whistling under his breath, the divot between his collarbones gleaming. He’s framed by the attic window for one brief moment as he hovers on the lip of the front step, going through his pockets for his key. 

When he looks up, catching Keith’s eyes, there’s a long slow moment, like the unfurling of black honey from a spoon. Then Keith’s sense kicks in and he slams the shutter closed. He can imagine the shiver of white paint raining down onto the street, and it’s an image that stays with him even after he’s closed his eyes, although he’s no proof to say it’s real: white paint on his neighbour’s hands, as though up close, as though Keith’s ever seen him at anything but a distance.

He doesn’t sleep well. Keith snaps awake in the rise of dawn, the sound of his own voice reflected back to him. The screaming always feels distant. He wonders, hand over mouth, eyes open to look at all the differences of the present and take them into mental evidence - because here is the desk, here is the ceiling, here are the white shutters with the flaking paint, and the whistling he can hear from someone down in the street through the window is the sound a human mouth can make and not a warning sign the world is about to shatter -

He’s not there he’s not there he’s _ not there _\- 

He wonders if his voice carries down two stories, if the sound of it - high and confused, a teakettle left alone over fire until it’s burnt right through - echoes like it seems to do here. 

*

The next morning, Keith runs into his neighbour, stood outside the bathroom. It’s surprising, since Keith is the only one on the attic level - meaning the tiny, cramped bathroom, with its waist-high sink and chipped porcelain, has been pretty much private territory since he settled in. 

“You took your time,” his neighbour says, as Keith exits the bathroom, clean-faced, shutting the door behind him. The sudden presence startles Keith, sends him reaching towards the side-table for the telephone. He’s got it lifted off the hook and held above his head before the sound of the static reaches his ears. 

“Easy,” his neighbour says, hands held out, placating, a razor in his fingers but the blade’s safely folded into the handle. “Easy.” Keith vaguely registers that those two words are in English, the pronunciation vaguely Americanised, but his neighbour slips back into Spanish in the next beat. “I’m not about to - I_ live here. _” 

It’s the first time Keith has ever heard him talk. It’s a good mimicry of Argentinian Spanish, Keith decides, but it’s a mimicry. 

“Good morning,” Keith manages, slowly putting the phone back on its hook without looking away. The man snorts. 

“Good morning to you, too.” 

“Don’t you live on the second floor anyway?” Keith hears himself asking. 

He hadn’t even known he’d noticed that. The stretch of the man’s smile seems to suggest he’s translating that into something it isn’t. And it isn’t. Only this close, Keith can see the freckles across his nose, lying one layer under his tan. How they skip the other bones of his faces like a broken gramophone, spreading out over his shoulders beneath an old undershirt. Keith forces his eyes up in time to catch the speculative raise of the other’s eyebrows. 

“But it’s only you up here, though. There’s eight of us down there and only the one bathroom for the floor, so I had the idea that - let’s share this one. Why not? How about it?”

“It sounds like you’ve already decided,” Keith informs him, and the man’s mouth parts in displeasure, souring like overheated fruit. 

“It _ sounded _ like I was trying to persuade you.” 

“To agree to something you already decided.” 

Keith realises he’s smirking. It doesn’t feel out of place on his face. 

“What do they call you, anyway?” the man asks, head tilted, squinting down at Keith like he’s categorising. “I mean, I’ve seen you before so I already picked something. If your real name’s an improvement, though, I can reconsider.” 

“Then call me whatever you like,” Keith replies, “It doesn’t make any difference to me. You should get going.” 

“Should I now?” 

For a moment, it’s like the air stops, crystallising. Then the church bell three streets down starts to toll out the hour, and the man’s eyes widen, panicked. 

“Jesus,” he says, and darts past Keith into the bathroom. 

“That’s not it,” Keith counters, “Try again.” 

But the only response is the slamming of the bathroom door. Later, Keith watches his neighbour rushing out the front door, raising the leather strap over his head in a loop. The books crash against his back with each beat of his footsteps as he starts to run; Keith makes sure to give him a leisurely wave. 

He checks the post-boxes in the cool dimness of the the stairwell, pausing on his own way past. The day filters in through the glass panels in the front door, but the glass is old, and a little warped, and so the light comes through oddly, as though Keith is underwater. 

There are eight people on the second floor - and all eight of them are men, so that doesn’t help. It makes sense: it’s a short-term boarding house, the whole building is made up of men chasing work across countries, and Keith thinks again of how the man’s Spanish hadn’t sounded like he was quite from here, even though the words themselves slid out like a second skin. Keith remembers the first word, though, the English one: _ easy. _ Keith remembers abruptly something the landlady said as she was rattling off rules and pressing the cold indent of a key into his hand, so cold in the heat of the day it almost burned. _ You’re from America, is it? Room 218 speaks English, but otherwise you’re going to need to stick to Spanish. _

Room 218. Leandro Cecilio Martinez y Arroyo. Keith thinks about it, weighs it in his mouth. _ Leandro. _

*

“Let’s make a trade,” Keith says, collaring Leandro in the corridor between Room 218 and the communal dining room Keith keeps to a small corner of. For a second, when Leandro blinks at him, Keith is a little afraid he’s forgotten who Keith is. 

“Sure,” Leandro says, after a moment, and before Keith can follow the route of how they got there, they’re sat on the steps outside the front door of the building. Watching Leandro light a cigarette - just the process of it, almost scientific, head bent like a boy at church towards the match cupped in his hands, the way the yellow light briefly illuminates the bones of his face - it’s unbearable, so Keith watches the tree directly opposite, leaves faltering in the heat. 

“Want one?” Leandro asks. Keith shakes his head without looking his way, can picture all too clearly the arc of his wrist and the cardboard box. He feels rather than sees Leandro shrug. There’s a silence. It feels comfortable to Keith, but he’s not sure how to tell when it becomes uncomfortable. Sometimes, he doesn’t notice the shift. 

“Where are your books?” he asks, and then is reminded immediately why he doesn’t talk for the sake of talking. 

“In my apartment,” Leandro replies, easily. “Do you read then?”

“Sometimes.” 

Another silence. Keith isn’t getting any better at this, is he? He can sense Leandro watching him. 

“Are you a librarian then?” Keith wonders, finally looking over, and when Leandro laughs, he worries that he must have gotten the Spanish word wrong, pronounced it sideways somehow. 

“No,” Leandro replies, “No, I’m not a librarian. You have to go to a school for that.” Keith didn’t get the word wrong, at least. That’s something. Leandro breathes out a couple of smoke rings, frowning in concentration, then says, “I’m a_ lectore _.” 

“I don’t know what that is,” Keith admits. 

“Do you know the white building with the red windows, about twenty minutes away? You turn right at the end of the street?” Leandro gestures with the lit end of his cigarette. Keith has no clue, but nods along. “That’s the Pererya factory. I work there.” He looks at Keith’s face and grins. “You don’t know it, do you?” 

“No.”

“It’s pretty big. I’m surprised.”

“I’m new here.” 

“You definitely are.” For a second, Leandro’s eyes drag down him, then he turns back, looking at the tree like Keith had before. “It’s a cigar factory. I read to the cigar rollers whilst they’re working. You know the newsreels, right?” 

“Yes,” Keith says, a little irritably, certain now he’s being made fun of, “I know the newsreels.”

They’re on at the picture-houses every Saturday morning. Even a child’s familiar with that. 

“Then you know my job. I’m a human newsreel, for as long as it takes them to figure out a way to bring news out of print or the picture-houses and right into your ears.” A pause. “So. You said something about a trade.” 

“You can share my bathroom, but -”

“Oh, it’s _ your _ bathroom? Thought it was the one for your whole floor? Sounds possessive of you.” 

“_ But _ I want -” Here Keith pauses, tripped up. He doesn’t know what he wants, he realises, abruptly, looking at Leandro looking back at him. 

And then Leandro smiles, and Keith thinks: _ that _. That part’s good. But that can’t be what he chooses. Keith’s new to town - he’s not stupid. 

“Didn’t figure out that part yet, huh?” Lance realises. 

“It’s - I’m -” 

“Keep it. You should save it, you know? For something you care about. I can owe you something for now.” 

“I’m not good at thinking of things.”

“Lucky for you, I’m bad at being in debt to people so I’ll help you out.” 

Leandro sticks a hand out. 

“Are you from America?” Keith asks him, taking it. For a split second, he can feel his heartbeat in his own palm, until Leandro lets go and lets Keith out of the handshake. Leandro shakes his head. 

“No, not like you. Cuba,” he says, then, switching to English: “What gave me away?” 

“Nothing. The landlady. It doesn’t matter. How did you know I was from America?”

“Lucky guess. The landlady. She talks a lot, doesn’t she?” Leandro stubs out his cigarette against the stone and stands up. “You know, she was telling us all you were in France or something. That true?” 

The look Keith gets this time is too knowing. Suddenly, he wants to spit at Leandro and tell him to take his eyes and the kindness in them back. Keith doesn’t want that to be understood about him, how Europe changed the very specific alchemy of his blood and his bone and made him into some strange new creature, a wound born out of the open womb of what men will do to each other, given the correct tipping point of circumstance. Keith opens his mouth, something scalding ready to pour out, but Leandro beats him to it. 

“I was in Belgium with the Red Cross,” Leandro says, like he’s not admitting to anything on the scale of what he is, actually, admitting to. It’s said so casually that were it not for the abrupt, bleak stillness in his eyes, Keith might mistake it for an idle comment. 

“I was with the French there,” Keith says. The confession’s rusty with disuse. “We had - there was a flying corps. For American volunteers. It was a couple of years before we, I mean before America officially joined - I was a pilot.” 

And there it is: years of toy planes in tin miniature, jangling at the bottom of Keith’s pockets like a second empty stomach, years of lying out on his back in the corn fields staring at the sky like he could sink into it - and wondering why the other orphanage boys bragged about taking girls out here, since they’d only get in the way of daydreaming, surely? Every single day of 1916, the smell of the leather in his uniform and rickety guns jamming the very second he needed them most and faces disappearing from the bunks and the bite of the air that high up, still crisp and perfect despite everything. All of it condensed down into four words, English, past tense: _ I was a pilot. _

“You know,” Leandro says, like he hasn’t noticed Keith is reeling internally, “There’s a few of us, down at the local dance club. Well, it’s mostly just me, and - my best friend here, he was there too - but if you wanted to be around - listen. I’m rambling.” 

“Probably,” Keith admits. Leandro pushes his hair back out of his eyes. 

“Okay, I’ll just - should I try again? I’ll try again. Why don’t you -” and here, Leandro gestures to Keith, as though they’re in the middle of a crowded ballroom, and not a deserted evening street. “Come out with me tomorrow - since tomorrow’s Saturday, and since you’re new, and I could introduce you around? Maybe? If you wanted?”

“It wouldn’t count towards the trade,” Keith warns him, but agrees. He wants to say he doesn’t know why. He knows why. He knows why like he knows why he paused at the post-box, trying to figure out Leandro’s name. He knows like he knows why he hasn’t asked Leandro what the name he thought of for Keith - what the name he must still be calling Keith in his own head is yet. 

That night, Keith passes the bathroom whilst Leandro is getting ready - for bed, Keith assumes, since it’s late. The smell of crushed flowers and slowly cooling stone is so potent Keith can taste it in his mouth when he breathes. It seeps into the corridor from an open window at the end of it, the lattices folded back, leaving a gleam of night, a great obsidian eye peeking through. Leandro’s head is underwater. He’s ducked fully under the running tap over the sink, water silvering off his bare shoulders when he stands back up, scrubbing at his face. There are muscles in his back that Keith understands from anatomy, sure, but he can’t translate how they take all the moisture out of the air, even in the midst of August, when each breath is soaked with the humidity. 

And then Leandro realises he’s being watched, catching a glimpse of Keith in the polish of the cracked mirror hung over the sink. It’s his turn to start, his mouth opening into a perfect oval before closing again. He licks his lips, wipes his mouth clean of water. It’s a self-conscious gesture. 

The look in his eyes, somehow struck - no, present tense - stricken - roots Keith to the spot for a split-second. And then remembers himself. 

“Goodnight, Leandro,” he manages to get out, choking on it. He bolts for the safety of his own apartment. 

*

And, then later, this too: the hard press of that same sink against Keith’s back, the porcelain of it digging into the vertebrae of his spine whilst Lance kisses him senseless, mouth a hot counterpoint to the discomfort. 

“You’re so -” Lance says, and doesn’t finish.

But that part’s later. For now, Keith feels the deadbolt slide into place on his apartment door and stands there - in the semi-darkness, air thick in his lungs, watching the moonlight puddle on the floor. His skin feels too hot to touch. 

Shit, he thinks, realising. He’d called Leandro by his name. 

*

When he comes home Saturday evening, seared by the sun and with sore feet, Leandro is sat on the floor outside of his apartment door, waiting for him. 

“I don’t take strays,” Keith tells him, searching for his key, “Try the church.” 

“Cute line. Does it work?” 

Keith doesn’t bother to answer, which is easier than admitting he doesn’t usually bother with - 

He tries and fails to not notice, in detail so precise it’s agony, the shine of Lance’s hair, slicked back with layers of pomade, the neat, unbroken lines of his suspenders across his chest, the starched collar and slacks. Lance looks up at him from under his eyelashes, but given their positions it could easily be accidental - and then he raises an eyebrow, which isn’t. 

“My name isn’t Leandro,” he says, sounding almost petulant. “Where’d you pull Leandro out of?”

So he’s got that to answer for tonight as well. Keith unlocks his apartment door, internally suppressing a sigh. 

“Your postbox,” he admits. Nothing else for it.

Leandro - no, not Leandro, only what else is Keith to call him? He doesn’t feel like he can fit back into the word neighbour anymore, the letters boundaries stretched to their limits with how he’s overstepping and stepping into Keith’s apartment like he’s been invited. He’s looking around, curiosity its own kind of hunger, devouring this last private realm. Keith still doesn’t disinvite him. He probably ought to. 

“Nobody calls me Leandro outside of my own mother. You saying it sounded -”

“I don’t suppose I sound much like your mother.” 

“No. Exactly.” There’s a pause. Not-Leandro is looking intently out of the window, and Keith has an absurd urge to rush down the stairs just to look up at him: their usual routine reversed. “It’s Lance,” he finally says, running a fingertip along the line of the windowpane and wrinkling his nose when it comes away dusty. He turns on his heel and looks at Keith. “My name’s Lance.” 

“I’m Keith,” Keith replies, and Lance’s smile widens, slowly, into something that feels private and almost obscene. 

“I know that,” Lance says. “I went and looked after that first time we talked.”

“Oh,” Keith says, since there’s not much else he can say to that. 

“You should get dressed, unless you’re going like that,” Lance says. Keith decides he’s going like that, just like how he is, just so Lance can roll his eyes and say: 

“Faces like yours forgive a lot of sins, but -” 

“Are you on the make?” Keith asks - finally asks, drops it down between them like a declaration of war - and he’s grateful they’re speaking in English, so he can make sure Lance understands him without having to say the whole of it outright. “Are you trying to - with me?” 

For a moment, Lance just looks at him. Cat’s got your tongue: it’d almost be funny, but for how Lance looks so ready to run, fear simmering under the surface. Keith is clumsy with words, for all he learnt French and for all he’s struggling through Spanish, and touch is no longer a native language. He’s not sure if it ever was. But he knows it counts for something. He knows it can be translated better, closer, more cleanly, so he snatches forward for Lance’s hand and tries not to notice when Lance flinches, as though in preparation for being struck down. He curls his fingers around Lance’s and brings Lance’s hand to the side of his face. He feels the leftover dust, transferred from the windowpane, against his own skin. When he lets go of Lance’s fingers, Lance doesn’t step away. 

“I was a stretcher-bearer,” he says instead, quietly. “In France.”

“That makes sense,” Keith replies, and Lance’s hand slides up and into his hair, catching a little on his ear. Touch is easier to translate: the word Keith thinks of is _wonder_. It’s one he knows in all three languages, the weight of the syllables an afterthought. 

“I could be so sweet to you, if you’d only let me,” Lance says to him. 

“If you mean it, then I’m letting you,” Keith replies, amends it, “I’m trying to let you, at least.” 

Lance doesn’t kiss him right then, and Keith tries not to be disappointed about it. He’d seen Lance’s eyes drop to his mouth, his gaze pressing down on them like a thumb, and Keith had parted his lips just the same, under some phantom pressure, and Lance had said, “We’ll be late,” and stepped mercifully away. 

Mercifully, except for how Keith had wanted to snatch him back all the same; except for how he could have stood there until the end of days, dust settling all around them. Except for how the war to end all wars had itself ended and they’d found themselves mysteriously on the other side of it - intact, still able to walk through the night streets in Argentina, too close for comfort, to go dancing. 

Wonder; merveille; maravillar. 

*

It’s two in the morning, that same Saturday melting into Sunday. In two days, the first ever radio news programme will be aired by a station in Detroit, Michigan, bringing them inexorably closer to the future, but for now there’s still sand in the hourglass and the city of Buenos Aires still needs Lance to stay in it, his voice rolling out over the factory floor. There are still whole hours left before the future arrives, and Keith is watching Lance dance in the middle of a crowded floor. And Keith has seen dancing before, but not like this: not men partnering men, circling each other like the first wary steps of a fight, like the first calculated steps of something close to seduction - 

And Keith thinks of the look in Lance’s eyes in that mirror reflection a few nights ago, of how Lance had recognised, wordlessly, that some time between him putting his head under that tap and coming up he’d slipped into Keith’s gaze. Into preyhood. 

_ It’s normal here, _ Lance said, smirking at Keith’s bewildered expression. _ Used to be there wasn’t enough women, and now there is, sure, but people still remember the history of it. _

Keith remembers seeing the tango in Paris, three years back, how it was the closest to sex he’d ever seen with clothes still on, limbs turned into hooks, fingers sinking into hair, clenching on hips, knuckles whitening. Only now, it’s two men, everywhere he looks, charged with intent. 

_ It’s normal here, _ Lance said, his hand a reassuring press against Keith’s shoulder blade, but Keith had heard: _ we’re normal here _, and breathed out. 

The song ends, and in the midst of the rising applause, Lance looks over, right at him, pinning Keith to his seat with his eyes. And then he beckons. 

“You want to?” he mouths. “With me?” 

The air in his lungs sharpens suddenly, despite the crowds and the sweat, like it used to when Keith was far, far above everything: weightless, buoyant, scared to hell. 

Keith is standing before he’s even realised what he wants. 

It’s Sunday. The future is not yet here. Buenos Aires is burning. Lance still owes him a favour. A trade. 

And Keith stays put, at the heart of the fire: still alive. 

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for the [Retrospect Zine](https://vintageklancezine.tumblr.com/), a zine based on 20th century history AUs, which was a pleasure to work with. Thank you so much - and thank you to everyone who supported the zine and thus directly supported the creation of this fic. 
> 
> Some historical notes, as per usual: 
> 
> [Here is an article about the history and culture of lectores that I used in writing this. ](http://mentalfloss.com/article/71485/lectores-who-read-cubas-cigar-rollers)
> 
> [The American volunteer air force in WW1, the Lafayette Escadrille, was a real thing and you can read about it here. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_Escadrille)
> 
> [Stretcher-bearers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretcher_bearer) in WW1 were a non-combatant role often associated with conscientious objectors since a large number of men who refused to take up arms for political or religious reasons opted to go into this role instead. These men were denounced as cowards, often for the rest of their lives. To this day, there are very few public memorials to them, despite the bravery, compassion and courage of their own convictions that these men displayed. 
> 
> It's never explicitly stated in the fic, since, you know, word count limits are a thing, but in this I always imagined Lance was a socialist and a conscientious objector on political grounds but still volunteered with the same kind of motives that men who later entered the Spanish Civil War did - because, for reference, since Lance is Cuban-American and volunteering with the American Red Cross before America entered WW1, he's a voluntary entrant to the war. I wanted to clarify since conscientious objectors is usually a term used to refer to people who are conscripted into service, but it's a label that Lance would have likely had applied to him regardless. I picked these two different roles in the war for Keith and Lance because they are very different ways of expressing the same idea: which is the desire to help people in need. It felt fitting for their dynamic. 


End file.
